This disclosure relates to techniques for conserving power in wireless user equipment to extend the life of a battery powering the user equipment. Various embodiments of method, apparatus, and non-transitory computer-readable medium are disclosed to facilitate power conservation in the wireless user equipment. The power conservation techniques find particular application in conjunction with user equipment that supports a carrier aggregation feature while the user equipment is operated in a wireless network that provides the carrier aggregation feature. Other applications of the power conservation techniques in conjunction with other wireless network features are also contemplated for the various embodiments described herein.
Smartphones are the Swiss army knives of the tech world. They function as music and video players, web browsers, personal organizers, calendar, mail reader, GPS and also a cell phone among other things. People don't want their smartphones to run out of battery life when they need it the most. Battery life is one of the most important considerations that people make when choosing a smartphone. With moderate use, one can extend the battery life to last an entire day before needing to be recharged.
Smartphones drain batteries faster in poor coverage areas searching for a good signal. Smartphones can also drain battery searching for open Wi-Fi Hot-Spots, Bluetooth, GPS, infrared capabilities. So users can take some simple precautions like turning off these features except when needed.
With the launch of carrier aggregation (CA) (e.g., a feature of long term evolution (LTE) Advanced and evolved universal terrestrial radio access networks (E-UTRA)), smartphones can gain access to a total bandwidth of up to 100 MHz and offering peak download speeds exceeding 1 Gb/s. For additional information on E-UTRAN, see, for example: i) 3GPP TS 36.331, version 9.3.0, Release 9, July 2010; and ii) 3GPP TS 36.306, version 11.4.0, Release 11, September 2013. The contents of these documents are fully incorporated herein by references. For CA, smartphones are constantly scanning for multiple eligible secondary component carriers while being connected to the primary component carrier. This may even cause the battery to drain faster when the smartphone is in good radio conditions. So, while a smartphone may be in the right radio conditions to support CA with multiple secondary carriers and give the user fast download/upload speeds, the battery life on the smartphone could be draining at a faster rate than desired. This may leave the user with a smartphone having no battery life when they need to use the device. A power management and power saving mode to optimize battery life of CA-capable smartphones is not available.
For these and other reasons, there is a need to define power management and power saving techniques for CA-capable wireless user equipment that is compatible with CA features offered by a wireless network.